Cris Beam

Cris Beam is the author of To The End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2013, and two other books. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University and New York University.

Foster kids are often called orphans of the living. It’s a particularly apt designation and rich emotional territory for a novel. Foster kids can neither mourn their missing parents nor fully attach ...